


All the Wrong Places

by Essie



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-06
Updated: 2010-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:16:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Essie/pseuds/Essie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco says hello to the world after his breakup with Harry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Wrong Places

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Ultimatum](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/255743) by magickmaurader. 



> This was inspired by magickmaurader 's "The Ultimatum" a gazillion years ago. It was written as a reaction/sequel to that piece (even though it already has an official sequel) but you certainly don't have to have read that to understand this. It stands alone. I hope. Many thanks to Joy for being awesomesauce and for the beta.

Harry might have had the decency to at least break up with him to his face, Draco thought bitterly, frowning at the packed suitcase Harry had left out on the front steps for him. He could go in and complain about it. Yell and scream and make a fuss, and demand to know what the bleeding hell Harry thought he was doing. Maybe they could throw things, and Draco would shake with the fury of being cast off like an old unwanted picture, and maybe he could make the bastard feel something.

But what would be the point?

They fought all the time. Some screaming, some glaring, and then usually some angry sex, and that was it. Nothing new.

Draco sighed and grabbed his case, snatching the insipid photo from the top. He didn't know what Harry thought he was getting at, leaving that out there for him. Just some salt in the wound, hm?

Over the top of the frame he could see the house Harry'd bought them. With its blue door and its white shudders, and its cobblestone pathway, it was the picture of domesticity, everything Harry wanted. And Draco had never belonged there.

Draco threw the picture against the house, frame and all, and Apparated before the shards of glass hit the ground.

 

A weekend in Paris, and then he'd gone back to his job at the Ministry, and asked for that position in foreign potion experimentation that they had offered him awhile ago, and he had turned down because it meant he'd be months away from Britain studying exotic plants in Merlin knows where, for months at a time.

 

As weeks passed, and time joined geography in vastness stretching between him and the past, Draco's letters to his mother became longer and more frequent. Narcissa seemed only too pleased at this turn of events, though she still made regular and insistent inquires about when he would be returning home.

Never. He'd think. I don't know. He'd write. Then he'd tell her about how much he loved traveling, and hope she loved him enough to let it be.

Or maybe she loved him too much, and that was the problem. The places he saw, would never ask him to stay.

 

Draco wasn't lonely, though. He talked to people quite frequently, local villagers, or other learned researchers. He made good friends, or as good a friend as you can make in a month or so, and he socialized, and ate and laughed, and only sometimes did he miss Harry.

But it didn't mean anything, really, that every now and then he would see a head of dark messy hair and remember the feel of Harry's hair as he clutched it in passion, or carded through it gently on a lazy Sunday morning. Or that sometimes when he caught the dip of a swaying branch in his periphery he thought of the way Harry looked on a broomstick. They were just thoughts, passing recollections. And if he thought about Harry most nights in his bed and almost every morning in the shower as he worked himself towards release, then it was only because people thought about sex when they did these things, and, after all, he had had a lot of sex with Harry Potter.

 

The job was incredible, and they sent him many exotic places, as promised, though Draco found out the hard way that exotic places also generally translated to uncivilized places. Draco Malfoy had never been one to enjoy sleeping in tents, but the African tribal remedies were revolutionary (or perhaps not so revolutionary, as they'd likely been around centuries before William the Conqueror destroyed every potions scroll in Britain), and the South American rain forests were the definition of natural beauty.

Gazing up at the canopy, patches of light flickering through the leaves in ethereal green snatches Draco felt a rare moment of humility. He felt the inexplicable urge to just tell someone. 'Look.' He wanted to say, 'Look, see what I've seen. Isn't it gorgeous? Listen.'

 

When the Ministry informed him that they were sending him to a series of lectures held in cities all across the world as his next assignment, Draco was ecstatic.

He got to sleep in real hotels, and even if they were sterile and bland, and all the exact bloody same, at least they were civilized. They had clean sheets, and hot running water, and toilets and doors, and some even had House Elves. And Draco was glad to be back in urban areas.

So he went sightseeing, and ate at nice restaurants, and shopped along the main drags, and on the nights he wasn't working he went clubbing.

 

The first time Draco had sex since his breakup with Harry he was drunk. It was a rather young Italian boy who put the phrase 'tall dark and handsome' to shame, but who had decided to stay safely away from the phrase 'good in bed.' And still Draco came hard and too early, because in all honesty it had been a while, and that was the thing about sex in any case: even when it was bad it was still pretty damn good.

So Draco tried again the next night, and the next, and all the nights he could manage it with the best looking partners he could manage it with.

 

A lanky woman who talked too much was skilled with her mouth in Naples. A blonde bloke made an obscene amount of noise as Draco took him bent over the crisp white sheets of his hotel room in St Petersburg. A transgender prostitute he found in Hong Kong was strangely timid, as he brought her/him slowly, gently, quietly to the end with his hand, and then his mouth, and finally himself moving carefully inside.

There were so many different, interesting people out there, and he wanted to meet them all, be with them all. Or at least all the pretty ones. There were so many things two (or more) people could do with their bodies, so many ways to connect.

It was never the way it used to be in Hogsmede. Something was always off. Only it wasn't, because it was the same, because, despite everything, it was still sex. Ancient, basic, necessary to life, and exactly the same as it had always been. Insert 'tab a' into 'slot b,' or 'slot c,' or whichever combination of tabs and slots you fancied at the time. There was still sweat and thrusting, and heavy breathing, and an over-exertion of abdominal muscles when you tried to kiss and fuck someone at the same time.

It was all exactly the same as it had always been, and would continue to always be the same as it currently was, and it reminded him a bit of that wizarding photograph Harry had left for him, looping continuously over the same several moments for all eternity.

But that was just life, and there was nothing to be done for it, so he did his best to enjoy all the moments he had.

 

The lectures were better than gathering wild flora in some ways, and worse in others. On one hand they were held inside relatively nice halls that were always kept at 22.2 degrees Celsius, and usually had comfortable seating, and he was never required to dig through the dirt, and possibly poisonous flora, or trek through the overgrowth with the sun beating down on his nose, and his disillusionment charm the only thing standing between him the and an attack from a large and rather dangerous magical beastie. On the hand they were lectures.

Draco learned quickly that his ability to listen attentively had a lot less to do with the subject being discussed and a lot more to do with the individual doing the discussing.

A middle-aged woman in Stockholm had a very large mole on her left cheek, and Draco found himself disturbingly captivated by it and thus unable to concentrate on the newest use of mugwort in mood elixirs.

An attractive man in Porto held Draco's attention rather tightly as he explained an innovative tool for measuring magical concentration.

A balding man, with a large belly, had a very strong accent, in Berlin, so Draco resigned himself to having no idea what he was on about. Hopefully it wasn't the cure for lycanthropy.

Once the speaker's given name had been Harry, and Draco had informed the Ministry he was sick that day.

All in all though, he didn't mind his job. He liked it even. When people asked him about it he'd say "It's nice. I get to travel." Sometimes they'd ask him if he missed his home, or what kind of things he saw, but usually they'd just agree that it sounded "interesting."

 

"I always wanted to travel," a pretty blonde in Nashville told him after quite a few drinks. She wore a mini skirt and too much makeup, and Draco thought her name might be Evangeline. "Never been out of the States, myself."

"Don't worry about it." Draco leaned in close, because his equilibrium wasn't what it normally was. "You're not missing much."

Evangeline's bright blue eyes poked out a bit and when she spoke her tone was the epitome of genuine curiosity. She reminded him a bit of cotton floss. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Draco leaned back and cradled his drink with the air of one about to explain something very important to someone obviously less intelligent than himself. "You live somewhere all your life and you think," he paused for emphasis, or more likely because he was too drunk to speak evenly without awkward pauses, "you think that you're living in this microcosm, this little sub-cultural bubble, and there's this whole big world," Draco waved his arms about in the magnanimous manner shared by all drunk men, "this macrocosm if you will, where people are thinking completely different thoughts, and behaving in entirely different ways," here he hiccoughed "and you're just, stuck, right? Stuck in this tiny little world. So then you get out and you go places and you realize," Draco's shoulders dropped and he examined his drink, a slight frown lining his face. He sighed "people are the fuckin' same everywhere."

There was a silence, and when Draco looked up it was to see Evangeline staring at him with a puzzled expression on her face.

"Did you think they wouldn't be?" This would have sounded condescending, if not for the earnestness that dripped off of everything Evangeline said.

Draco shrugged, "Dunno." he swirled the dregs of liquid around the ice in his glass. "Guess I figured with six billion people out there, they wouldn't all be carbon copies." Draco gave an apathetic nod before downing the last of his rum and coke.

Evangeline nodded emphatically, fully enraptured in Draco's conversational skills, "That's why I want to find The One."

"The One?" Draco asked dryly, then he tilted his head, as if considering, "Is that some sort of religious thing?" He highly doubted that she would notice he was making fun of her.

She didn't.

Evangeline's eyes widened and she shook her head. Too easy. "Oh no. I mean The One." She breathed these last two words reverently, and Draco was far too pissed at this point to be bothered with the sanity of his drinking partner. "You know, The One Person who will complete you completely. Your one true love. Your soul mate."

Draco snorted "Good luck with that."

"You don't believe in true love?" She sounded disproportionately distressed.

"Oh, I believe in true love alright," he assured her "I just don't believe in the thing you're talking about."

"You don't think there's only one person in the whole world who's meant for you?" Draco thought if she ever produced a Patronus it might just be a big mass of glitter.

"Sure." He was tired of this conversation. He was tired of this place. He was just tired.

"Have you met more than one then?" Her voice was absurdly genuine, and she looked at him with big blue eyes open and inquisitive, shining with a kind the kind of hope that shouldn't exist.

Draco picked up the tab and went back to his hotel room.

 

It was only two days after talking with her, that Draco realized Evangeline was possibly the most intelligent person he'd ever met.  
A lecture on Merlin knows what had just finished up, and he was in the reception hall mingling by the cheese and crackers table, when a man with a very obvious comb over asked him about his job.

"I do a lot of traveling."

"Do you really? Where do you go?"

"Oh." Draco shrugged, spreading brie across his stoned wheat thin. "All over the world."

"That sounds very interesting."

Draco took a bite of his snack, frowning. "It isn't really."

"Oh?" Comb-over looked confused, as if no one had ever given him a cynical response around a mouthful of baked brie in his life. "Why do you say that?" he asked tentatively.

So Draco told him everything he had said to Evangeline a few nights before, with more articulateness, less drunken pauses, and equal cussing.

"…the fucking same everywhere." Draco's eyes narrowed slightly as his sober mind began to move, "so I guess that means that…that if you find someone who's… maybe less boring than all the rest…who's just different enough to you that it matters, and you think you might be able to stand to be around them forever, and maybe even enjoy it most of the time…If you can find just one person then, then the place you really ought to be is with Harry."

"Who's Harry?" Comb-over asked, but Draco wasn't listening.

"I need to get to Hogsmeade as soon as possible," Draco said urgently to the balding man in front of him, who was looking at Draco as though he thought Draco might try using the brie for sunscreen.

Draco didn't care. He rushed out of the hall as fast as he could. He needed to get to Hogsmeade, to Harry. How could he have been so stupid and just left like that? Why did he wait so long to figure this out and contact Harry again? For all he knew Harry had moved on by now; he probably had. He was probably sitting in his cozy little home in his cozy little village, snuggled up cozy in bed with his new boy. And Draco couldn't help but growl at the image that brought to mind. That was his bed, his house, the love of his life. Mine.

Draco was anxious all the way to the portkey office, heart jack-hammering against his ribs, a million different thoughts of what Harry could be doing now long playing in his mind.

He took a portkey to Scotland and Apparated directly to their house in Hogsmeade. He banged loudly at the front door, not caring about the time difference, that it was one in the morning here.

Draco stood on the front stoop struggling to catch his breath as he listened to Harry's footsteps coming down the stairs, and watched the front door slowly swing open.

And there he was: Harry, his Harry, bleary and rumpled and very confused and obviously alone, and just exactly as Draco remembered him, only better somehow.

And just a few moments ago it had seemed very important that he get here as soon as possible, but now that he was here, and Harry was standing in front of him Draco felt like he had all the time in the world.

"Draco?" Harry blinked in confusion, and Draco couldn't contain himself any longer. He threw himself against Harry, kissing him blindly on the mouth. Draco pulled back before Harry had a chance to respond, because he had no question as to what he wanted, and it was right here.

"Marry me," he ordered.

An amazed and brilliant grin broke slowly over Harry face, and Draco thought it looked very much like home.


End file.
